“Yes,” I confirm.
“You think you can control them? Or d’you want us to refuse entry?”
“They’ll be fine.”
A grunt of disbelief, but he lets them through. A couple of hours later a bald, stooping sixtysomething giant in a black cowboy hat with silver studs, skintight stone-washed denims, and irrefutably genuine rawhide boots bursts through our swing doors, followed by a mob of similar rejects from the
farang
subconscious.
A whoop. “Sonchai, my man! Hey guys, here he is, Mr. Viagra himself. Gimme the coldest beer you got, kid.” Leaning forward, whispering with urgency: “Score the dope like I told you in my e-mail?” A side whisper from mouth-corner to his closest aides: “What d’you say, fellas, a few beers before we get into the joints? Sonchai won’t let us smoke on the premises, so we’ll have to take it back to the hotel—or bribe him to let us smoke upstairs.”
“Oh, he takes bribes? That’s just like the cops on Freak Street in the old days.”
“I don’t take bribes,” I say.
“That’s right, behave yourselves and act civil, this is a Buddhist country and Sonchai here is a yogi—he meditates every day.” Turning to me: “So you got it?”
I reach behind the bar and hand over a package about three inches by two by one, wrapped in brown paper. My mother and I both decided that no way was the bar ever going to sell narcotics, not even ganja, but Colonel Vikorn, after his first glimpse of this gang, decided that any tranquilizer was better than geriatric freaks on alcohol tearing the place apart. The old giant hands over two thousand baht (Nong took over the pricing—that’s roughly a thousand-percent markup), then grabs the package and disappears into the men’s room, together with a few others in the know. I remember that Lou Reed is a great favorite with this crowd and send
Transformer
blasting through the sound system. In less than ten minutes the big cowboy and his cronies are emerging from the toilets. Lalita has just arrived and recognizes the gang from last time but cannot remember anyone’s name. A brisk wave: “Hi guys,
sabai dee mai
?”
“Hey Lalita, just great to be here. Jeez, do you have to be so goddamned beautiful?” To Lalita with pleading eyes: “I’m suffocating over there, La, we all are. To be old and sick is bad, but suppose you ain’t sick? Suppose all your bits are still in full working order, but you got a mug so craggy and out of date, people look at you like you’re a Model T Ford?”
Now Om and Nat arrive, one in jeans, the other in a black dress with arabesque trimmings that dips so deeply at the back, you can tell she’s not wearing underwear.
Nat’s dress has sent the tour group into fantasyland. “Hey, guys, time to score the Viagra?”
Now the rest of the girls arrive.
The first thing each of them does as she crosses the threshold is to
wai
the Buddha statue in the corner above the cash register. He’s a little guy no taller than two feet with, according to my mother’s grasp of Buddhist doctrine, a gargantuan appetite for marigolds and incense and is liable to turn the luck off pronto if we let him go hungry.
All the girls have worked this gang before and manage them skillfully as they squeeze past hoary groping hands on their way to the lockers. They are all taking signals from me that the evening is not to start too quickly. After Chanya’s adventure there is an increased police presence on the street. The cops are all controlled by Vikorn, of course, but appearances are important at times like this.
The bald giant calls to me: “What do we do about the blue pills, Sonchai? They on the house again?”
“No, not on the house. You can get them from a pharmacy. Any pharmacy.”
“Okay, right, boys, policy change. We have to go buy our own Viagra. How about we do that, freshen up, raid the minibars, smoke a few spliffs, and come back ready to rock and roll?”
Whoops of joy at this magic phrase. It is only when they have all trooped out that I notice the stranger who must have slipped in when my back was turned. In his early twenties, big, broad-shouldered, long black pants, polished black shoes, stark white shirt, an intensity to his gaze that could be mistaken for a permanent frown. Not exactly a typical customer, especially when you take into account the black hair, pencil mustache, and brown skin.
All the girls have gone to their lockers now that the gang has left. He and I are the only ones in the bar. I switch the music back to Chopin.
The newcomer seems not to notice the distillation of high genius that emerges from the sound system in the form of infinitely tumbling and rising piano notes. He orders a can of Coke and sits on one of the stools at the bar. He looks at me, Thai to Thai.
“You’re a pimp?” the stranger says in a tone of surprise, too innocent to be insulting. I do not bother to explain the technical difference between what I do and what a pimp does.
Despite the frown, he is a handsome fellow, somewhat thickset for Thai genes. He makes no secret of his contempt for those aging punks—or for me. He glances around at the pictures of Elvis, Sinatra, et cetera, with a sneer. I find it hard to meet the purity of his gaze.
“American,” he says in a neutral tone. He knows I will not mistake his meaning.
I respond with a smile, raise my hands: what can you do?
He catches sight of the Buddha above the cash register and connects him to me with a sweep of his eyes. “They told me you were Buddhist—I mean a real one, not a superstitious peasant.”
“Did they?”
He wants to say more (perhaps he is a little young for his age—his kind often are), but his silence is judgment enough. To tell the truth, I’m caught off guard. The last time I saw such religious sincerity was in a monastery, but this is no Buddhist monk. In the near-empty bar I find myself looking around with his eyes. Not particularly uplifting, I guess, a tad too earthy for a pure soul. (But then look what pure souls have done to the earth, I remind myself.) I refuse the unspoken invitation to repent, and we are in a kind of silent standoff that I do not believe he can win (my bar, my street, my country, my religion—I belong to the majority here), when he fishes in the pocket of his pants to pull out a piece of A4 paper, folded into four. He spreads it out on the bar, watching my expression carefully. It is a digital picture of the
farang
Chanya murdered. I’m not able to control the flash of paranoia that passes across my face. The Muslim notes and records my wild-eyed moment, but there is no opportunity for explanation or discussion because the rest of the girls have begun to arrive, one by one.
7
H
omer listed ships. Should I not similarly honor the vessels of our salvation on the wine-dark sea of market forces?
Nat: Most of the girls keep their work clothes in lockers at the back of the bar, but Nat likes to dress up before she arrives. She claims it’s because she needs time to work her way into her role, but Chanya once told me she tries to find customers on the sky train on her way to work. It’s true she calls in sick more than the others, usually just when she would have been on the sky train on her way to us. That’s okay, every girl has her idiosyncrasies, which probably make her unemployable in most professions. Look at Chanya, for example. In the circumstances, what other employer would have been so forgiving?
Marly: At twenty-seven, Marly is one of our smartest practitioners. Like most true professionals, she sees repeat business as the best way of evening out the violent sine curves of the trade, and that means setting her sights on the middle-aged and older. The charms of younger customers are more than offset by gentleness, generosity, fatherly kindness, wealth, and a tendency in the aged to go to sleep early, thus leaving her free for a little moonlighting should she need the dough.
Lalita is in an asymmetrical YSL fake in black with dipping back and plunging cleavage, revealing her beautifully enhanced bosom—tastefully done by a skilled surgeon, nothing too exaggerated. She is very gifted and has already built a fine two-story house with carport on a piece of land in her home village. Last week her earnings permitted her to purchase two more water buffalo for her parents to rent out. Her opening line to all newcomers: “I loved you from the moment I saw you walk through the door.” I still smile to myself at how often it seems to work.
Wan and Pat, close friends, are wearing identical hot pants with tit-hugging tank tops and high heels. They are not from Isaan, which is in the Northeast, but Chiang Mai province in the far Northwest, where the weather is cooler and the opium fresher. They come from a hill village belonging to the Hmong tribe, where they grew up expert in poppy cultivation. When compulsory crop substitution made them redundant, they graciously switched vices to enable their families to make up for the reduced income. They plan to open a beauty salon in Chiang Mai as soon as they’ve scraped the money together.
Om, with a naturally boyish figure, has cut off her denims at the crotch and leaves cotton strings wherever she sits. She is from Phuket, where tourism has made everyone rich. She grew up without want but got bored with the family minimarket and came to Krung Thep in search of adventure. For her, prostitution is mostly a sport in which the huntress uses charm, guile, and the power of sex. The object is for the john to voluntarily transfer the cash in his wallet to her purse without noticing what a sucker he is.
Ay is in a bikini and high heels, revealing the silver insert in her navel at the center of her flat brown stomach, not to mention the leaping swordfish whose sword peaks just above her panty line. She is a true child of Isaan, where she grew up unlettered. As is often the case with the illiterate, she owns a photographic memory and never fails to recall a john’s name, even if she hasn’t seen him for a year: a powerful charm in this line of work.
Here is Bon. She is more global than the others. She uses us as a base but prefers the more lucrative destinations of Tokyo, Singapore, and Hong Kong. She is a visa expert and offers free advice to any of the girls thinking of relocating overseas. Her English is all but perfect, and I’m told her Japanese is not half bad. She runs her own web page, which brings her a certain amount of work and enables her to keep up with her foreign customers. Way ahead of the curve, she owns her own small business in her home village that her mother manages.
Ah now, here is one of my favorites. Urn is from the poorest part of Isaan, next to the Cambodian border, a genuine country girl who will not defile her identity by learning to read and write or by learning English beyond the skeletal vocabulary necessary for trade. She is slightly flat-footed from a childhood spent in the rice paddy and likes to roll her trousers up to her calves as if she were wading through a swamp. She is reflexively superstitious and never omits to
wai
the Buddha or to take her shoes off when she enters the bar—for which the others never cease to tease her. She speaks Thai with a hayseed accent and a maximum of vulgarity. She also owns an exceptional figure and a brilliant smile, so she does not starve.
Su: nothing special to look at, but both my mother and I are in awe of her true Thai indolence. As an experiment the other day, I sent a missionary over to her. (We get them from time to time: white shirt, black tie with tiny knot, the sad courtesy of the professional sin-buster, Bible in quick-release shoulder holster—I’m afraid they all look the same to me, the men and the women.)
Missionary to Su: “Whatever you earn, I’ll pay you the same for cleaning my condominium every morning.”
Su (threatened, conflicted, and distressed): “Couldn’t we just fuck?”
Farang,
tell your evangelists not to bundle salvation with the work ethic. It really doesn’t play in the tropics. Even the Muslims and the Catholics know better than that, and we Buddhists have bagged ninety percent of the market by peddling inertia for two and a half millennia.
Sonja: she is not with us anymore, but in her day she was quite the most beautiful girl in the street, a small star-shaped scar on her left cheek notwithstanding. (Motorbike: ninety percent of the scarring on Thai flesh is due to taking a corner too fast while drunk.) Her life changed when she saw a B movie starring Ronald Reagan in which the heroine, also scarred, came out with the immortal line, which Sonja immediately committed to memory: “Oh, how can any man love me when I am so hideously disfigured?” The ploy proved so fetching, she had to produce a short list of suitors, which consisted of an Englishman, an American, and a Chinaman.
The Englishman: “But darling, it only makes me love you all the more.”
The American: “Come to the States, I’ll have someone take care of it.”
The Chinaman: “I want a ten percent discount.”
Naturally, having been trained by my mother, Sonja chose the man most likely to make a fortune in this lifetime and went to live happily ever after in Shanghai with the Chinaman. (It’s your system,
farang.
)
And so on. Not a one of them whose combination of calculation and naÏveté could not defeat the hardest of asses—unless the hardass has God on his side, of course. The dark young stranger has not ceased to squirm and sneer since the girls came trooping in. The moment is saved by the Australian, thank Buddha, who trips on the threshold with his habitual curse.
8
S
lim and wiry, about thirty-six, his inevitable name is Greg, and he has been a regular these past two months. He sits next to Ay, who immediately and expertly shifts on the stool so she can hook a leg over Greg’s walking shorts. Greg appears not to notice.
“Gimme a Foster’s, Sonchai.” A cock of the head. “Thirsty weather, mate.”
“You buy me drink,” Ay says.
“Do I know you?”
“Yes.”
“Better give her one, Sonchai.”
The young Muslim is watching.
Ay finishes her tequila in one, then sucks on the salt-encrusted lime. Nobody knows what swarthy fellow in a sombrero first introduced our working girls to tequila (okay, it was probably a Chinese entrepreneur), but history will reveal this act of marketing genius in its true glory.